Silent removal of games

Submitted by Curly Brace on Sat, 11/16/2013 - 08:21

Hi guys

I've noticed some unpleasant tendency that began taking place some time ago, namely, unpublishing of games without notifying anyone and without specifying a reason. E.g., I've just found out that http://www.lgdb.org/game/star_maiden_rio (posted by me some time ago) was unpublished. I can _guess_ it happened because of download link specified on a game page was broken. However, it took only couple of minutes for me to find working link, so I see no reason why should it be unpublished. I can only guess how many more games were unpublished in similar manner.

What I want to propose is:

Auto PM all admins on game unpublish

Make every game edit to cause new revision to be created (now you can specify, whether you want to create revision or not)

there is no silent removal, most of the time they are unpublished because the links lead to nowhere(which can be a temp. issue eg: server down) you can also look at them under Find Content http://www.lgdb.org/admin/content

I agree that dead games (when there's no download provided by developers) should be unpublished. What I'm concerned about is:

In case of temporary problems (e.g. dead link, but it's possible to find working link) the person who is somehow responsible for the game (e.g. the one who posted it) doesn't get notified of problem and cannot fix it

It is difficult to undestand why the game was unpublished after some time have passed. For example: Neverputt (http://www.lgdb.org/game/neverputt). Downloads on game page seem to be working fine. There are no comments on why was it unpublished, so I'm confused whether this needs to be published again or left as is.

Looking through all the list of unpublished games seems inconvenient form me; IMO it's much easier to solve the problem immediately when it occurs

you can't do it because of temporary issues eg: server down, dns change, new domain... - so the best way is to unpublish them and look for the page from time to time

>Just noticed - Neverputt was renamed to Neverball, but that actually illustrates

I remember neverball it wasn't updated since years, the link lead to a page full of neverball with no neverputt downloads or links so I renamed this to neverball because neverball was missing and neverputt was / is nowhere available

Also, at that time I had ~200 opened tabs with games that lacked alot of tags and I edited one after another some links lead to nowhere so I googled for them and replaced their urls

Maybe we could leave them published but display a big warning (like on Wikipedia) that this game page is not complete and/or the game is not availably atm for linux, or that the article is a stub and needs improving...

for a moderator it means just flagging the content appropriately. even less administrative work and better user information.

>>Just noticed - Neverputt was renamed to Neverball, but that actually illustrates

> I remember neverball it wasn't updated since years, the link lead to a page full of neverball with no neverputt downloads or links so I renamed this to neverball because neverball was missing and neverputt was / is nowhere available

From Neverball's download page: "Neverball, which includes Neverputt, is available for download here, and will run on most popular operating systems. Neverball is released under the GNU GPL."
Also "Also found here is Neverputt, a hot-seat multiplayer miniature golf game, built on the physics and graphics engine of Neverball."

So Neverputt is still around and kicking, it's just bundled with Neverball. You can't get one without the other. I don't think it should be removed from LGDB, it's still one of the most polished open-source Linux games out there.